[Powers] Resurrection with Option to Cancel
 

Powers: Divine Favor has two methods to bring people back to life.

Raise Dead (p. 13) uses a retroactive permanent Affliction of Extra Life. Resurrection (p. 16) uses an temporary Affliction of both Regen and Unkillable 1.

I'd like a power build that allows you to resurrect the dead, permanently (as the two above abilities do), but allows the option for you to put down those that you've personally resurrected easily.

I thought immediately of the Cancellation enhancement for Affliction listed on Psionic Powers, p. 13. That wouldn't really be useful on the Resurrection build (since it employs temporary affliction on a corpse to "make it better"). But maybe it's reasonable to allow it on the Raise Dead build? Except that it explicitly retroactively permanently afflicts Extra Life, so it gets "used up" immediately, and maybe can't be "cancelled" anymore.

So is Cancellation reasonable to do this?

Otherwise, the only thing I could think of was adding into the resurrecting Affliction some sort of permanent super-aggressive Weakness or high level of Susceptible or something along those lines that would be specific to your abilities alone. Or maybe some modified Self-Destruct (Depends on Will of Resurrecter, not on age) with Reduced Time to make it happen more quickly?

Re: [Powers] Resurrection with Option to Cancel
 

Maybe Add Terminal Condition as an Afflcition.

Re: [Powers] Resurrection with Option to Cancel
 

GURPS Fan's Poor Man's Resurrection is an interesting possibility if you can live with the wonkiness. The biggest problem would probably be that you can only have one resurrectee at a time.

Re: [Powers] Resurrection with Option to Cancel
 

Yes, it is, and if you want to make sure that no one and nothing else can undo the Raise Dead but the bestower, it's the only way I know of.

But it would be cheaper to reduce Permanent +300% to Permanent +150% and define "can be canceled by raiser" as the overt antidote, if you can live with there being other discoverable ways of canceling the effect, like excommunication, holy curses, etc.

Re: [Powers] Resurrection with Option to Cancel
 

No. Neither build has any ongoing effects that can be cancelled. If you afflict Extra Life, it's used up and gone. If you afflict Regeneration+Unkillable, the effects are gone once the affliction's duration ends (within minutes).

Dependency (Rare, Constantly; Resurrector's Will) [-150]?

Re: [Powers] Resurrection with Option to Cancel
 

That would kill him when the resurrector dies. Maybe better Dependency (Rare, Constantly, Resurrector does not wish his death) ?

Re: [Powers] Resurrection with Option to Cancel
 

This generally adds a way other people could use to terminate your Affliction. It certainly could be a way you could do so as well. Although in this case, switching the +300% version of Permanent for the +150% version would be a more cost effective way to have a build with a Terminal Condition built-in. In either case these approaches wouldn't be appropriate if I wanted it to be impossible for anyone to undo my Affliction besides me.

Very interesting. With Permanent added to it, it gets more expensive but it does close to what I want. I could always add a limitation, like an Accessibility or Preparation Required, that'd require me to get the remains and incinerate them into a fine ash and have that present before I could use the ability, which would effectively negate some of the "philosophical" issues (of possible copies). It's not my ideal choice but even if I don't end up using this Snatcher-based build as a base, it's something I'm putting in my bookmarks and mental "shelf" for later use / inspiration. :-)

So we have two opposing opinions about the validity of Cancellation in this case. The proposal to use Permanent +150% did make me wonder what that would do to this retroactive Affliction of Extra Life. There's no reason why it should fail to work, right? After all, if someone curses you with an Affliction of one or more disadvantages, with Permanent +150%, it still hurts you as if it was +300% (until you find the way to dispel it), and you still benefit from beneficial afflictions that are only at Perm +150% until dispelled. So why not Extra Life? And if it's afflicted retroactively, why couldn't it be cancelled retroactively? That said, I do like the Dependency idea (although I'd need to add Reduced Time to make it more rapidly lethal if I went that way with it, like 1 or even more HP lost per second).

So in the end, barring an official ruling that this is plain wrong, I think it makes sense to use Cancellation and interpret that retroactively as well, if I want a build that allows only the raiser to put down the raised. Although I've thought about it and I think Permanent +150% that involves using an incantation to terminate retroactively the Extra Life Affliction is actually what I want. It would be known to the raiser, of course, but could be researched or discovered by others and that seems fine.

Re: [Powers] Resurrection with Option to Cancel
 

Good point, the resurrector's death isn't meant to kill the resurrectees.

Re: [Powers] Resurrection with Option to Cancel
 

I am curious about the consequences for the game world. The Gods of Death (or Life) grant Extra Life only with a backdoor in case the resurrectee turns against them ? The less nice resurectees suddenly have a strong reason to get their resurrector killed as fast as possible ? The resurrectors keep secret files to be opened by their successors in case they are murdered ?

Re: [Powers] Resurrection with Option to Cancel
 

All of the above are possible consequences depending on the world. In the game world I GM, the ability represents a summoning (forcing) of the spirit and soul of a person back to their body, after which the body gains a virtually perfect semblance of life. No gods are involved; and although it obviously can be used for good, it was developed by self-serving necromancers that most would call evil. But the ability is contrary to the natural order, and there is an artificial quality to the life that's restored (some good, some bad); the complete ability would resurrect people with Unaging, Sanitized Metabolism, Less Sleep 8 (not Doesn't Sleep because they don't need to sleep but they can be made to sleep), Doesn't Eat or Drink, the feature "Doesn't count as life for purposes of things like Detect Life", and Cannot Learn (applies to Physical improvement too).

It's loosely based on some resurrection abilities seen in Lovecraftian fiction. Naruto (an anime) also has a chakra-based resurrection technique which is similar.